Page 56 - AVN June 2019

FANTASY
FUEL
Bellesa feeds the need for
female-friendly erotica
Women and pornography. Like many
relationships, it’s complicated.
Until the home video revolution came
along, most hardcore porn was sold or
traded in spaces that were not welcoming
to women: stag parties, dirty urban
arcades and sex shops that catered to
the so-called raincoater crowd.
After that came online porn, which
had its own barriers to entry. Take the
experiences of Michelle Shnaidman. As
a young woman born in the digital era,
Shnaidman didn’t feel welcome on tube
sites, where female bodies are center
stage, but women are not catered to as
consumers.
“I would log onto these websites and
I couldn’t shake this feeling of being
alienated. For me personally it didn’t feel
accessible to me, didn’t speak to me.
There’s amazing content out there, but a
lot of it is made by men, for men. And so
I really couldn’t shake that. It became an
obsession,” Shnaidman said.
Two years ago, Shnaidman came up
5 6 ≠ STORY: SHARAN STREET
≠ PHOTOGRAPHY: BELLESA FILMS/JEFF KOGA
A V N . C O M | 6 . 1 9 | I N T E R V I E W